A Manager's
Perspective
Kyu Oh is a Manager with Alvarez & Marsal’s Consumer and Retail Group in Seattle.
A Day in the Life
Here’s an account – in Kyu’s words – of a typical day working as an A&M Manager.
Current Engagement: Kyu’s client is a national value-focused retailer. As part of a multi-year transformation, the company brought on A&M to improve sales and profitability through all fronts from org redesign to store excellence.
6:45 am
My alarm goes off and it’s time to get ready. Our team is traveling this week and I pick up an iced cold brew from the Starbucks across the street from our hotel, catch up on emails, and watch the news.
7:30 am
Our team has our internal touchpoint where we discuss the day’s work plan and priorities. We are launching a pilot program today to transform elements of store operations, so we conduct a final run-through of the logistics and training agenda that we designed for the past month. After the meeting, I take an Uber from the hotel to the store and arrive early before the launch of the pilot, making sure everything is ready to go.
9:00 am
We kick off our training session, attended by store managers, corporate employees, and A&M consultants. Our Managing Director gives an overview of the pilot and what we hope to achieve. Over the course of 3 hours, the A&M team takes the group through different elements of the pilot and leads the session in both lecture and showcase-style to demonstrate the pilot solution.
12:00 pm
We wrap up our training session, and head to the client’s office to debrief. On the way back, our team grabs salads to go.
3:00 pm
I meet with a client who I am partnering with to improve store manager task efficiency. We are working on a process to improve how checklists are managed at our stores and discuss next steps with our cross-functional teams to design a rollout plan.
4:00 pm
Our team meet to discuss the impact and results of one of our pilot programs. As our team had hypothesized, we saw a significant impact and clarified the nuances through the collected data. We will need to work on organizing the results to share it with the CEO in a weekly meeting on Friday.
6:30pm
It is still bright outside and our team goes to eat dinner at a rooftop restaurant by our hotel.
8:00pm
We are back to the hotel after dinner, discuss individual tasks that need to be done before we sign off for the night. I finish a few slides for tomorrow morning’s meeting from my hotel room. I also write some notes down to organize my thoughts on next steps on the pilot, and to prepare for tomorrow morning’s meetings.
10:00pm
I FaceTime my friends and family and wrap up for the night.